Pignolo La Tunella 2018

Pignolo from the Friuli winery La Tunella is an intense and structured wine made from the vinification of the native red grape variety of the same name. We usually think of Friuli Venezia Giulia as a land of great whites; while this is true for Collio, in the Colli Orientali area, the tradition of producing reds of character and personality has been alive for centuries. Pignolo is a local variety that gives concentrated, powerful wines with definitely exuberant tannins and freshness. Long ageing in wood allows the wine to soften its youthful harshness and present an intense, rich sip with evolved complex aromas. It is a great gastronomic wine, which at the table, finds the best pairings with braised red meats or stewed game.

Pignolo, along with Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso and Schioppettino, is one of the symbolic reds of the winery Tunella, a fine winery in the Colli Orientali, which owns an estate of about 70 hectares. The vineyards are located on the rolling hills that draw the countryside of the territories of Cividale del Friuli, Premariacco, Manzano and Corno di Rosazzo. The Julian Alps offer protection from the cold northeast winds and breezes from the Adriatic help to mitigate the climate. Under these special conditions, red grapes also reach full ripeness with great aromatic richness. Pignolo has always been grown in Friuli, and only after the advent of phylloxera had it been abandoned in favour of the more famous international grape varieties. In recent decades, with the renewed interest in indigenous varieties, it has regained space in the vineyard, with clones recovered from some old vines at the Abbey of Rosazzo.

La Tunella's Pignolo is a particularly interesting version of this traditional Friulian red. It is a wine that needs time, that must be waited for so that its somewhat wild character is tamed by a long period of maturation of the wood. At the end of the manual harvest, the best bunches undergo a light withering. Fermentation is then carried out using indigenous yeasts and maceration on the skins of about 3 weeks. The wine rests in oak tonneaux for at least 4 years and completes ageing with an additional year in the bottle. It has a dark ruby red colour with garnet highlights, and on the nose expresses aromas of soft spices, red fruit jam, fruit under spirits, hints of humus and underbrush, and hints of bitter cocoa and tobacco. The palate has an important body, with dense and lively tannins and dense and complex aromas accompanying the sip towards a fresh and very persistent finish. An ideal label for those who like to break out of the classic mold of the best-known and most popular reds and discover a small rarity from the land of Friuli.